Employees of Asiana Airlines' head office in Seoul take calls in front of a screen showing a news program reporting about Flight 214 on Sunday. / Pool photo by Lee Jin-man

by Barry Schiff, USATODAY

by Barry Schiff, USATODAY

If you're shocked by the seeming inexperience of the pilot whose plane crashed in San Francisco Saturday, don't be. His 43 hours handling the Boeing 777 shouldn't, by itself, be anything to worry about.

When you think about it, every commercial airline pilot effectively starts at zero hours of real flight experience in a given airplane. Given the high cost of airplane fuel these days, it's not like a pilot can take a new high-powered jetliner out for a "spin" for practice. Fortunately for the airlines and the traveling public, there is nothing inherently dangerous about this.

No official cause for the Asiana crash has been determined. But it's worth understanding what goes into a commercial pilot's training when a new aircraft is being added to a fleet.

A captain first attends an intensive ground school to learn the new aircraft's systems and performance. The pilot then transitions to a simulator in which he spends much time (typically 30-40 hours) learning to perform every maneuver and coping with virtually every emergency that is ever likely to challenge him in the real world.

Modern simulators are so realistic that a new captain can take a flight test in one and be issued a license to fly the actual aircraft without ever having gotten off the ground.

After this, a new captain is assigned his first flight and, yes, it is one loaded with unsuspecting passengers. If such passengers were to be informed of this, should it give them cause for alarm? Not at all. If I were a passenger on such a flight -- and I have been -- I would simply go to my seat and take a nap. The reason for having such trust is my knowledge that a captain new to an airplane is always accompanied by a very experienced instructor to serve as his co-pilot. That, at least, is the way it works with U.S. air carriers. A convincing argument can be made that such a flight is actually safer than a conventional flight with an experienced captain because instructor oversight allows no deviation whatsoever from established safety standards.

In the case of the South Korean pilots, Asiana officials said the pilot, Lee Gang-guk, had more than 9,000 hours of experience in other jetliners, including the Boeing 737s and 747s. His co-pilot, on his first flight as an instructor, had more than 3,000 hours of experience flying on the 777, which they were flying on Saturday.

But even experienced pilots sometime make errors. National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Deborah Hersman has said the Asiana 777 was flying "far below its target speed for landing." If so, it was in violation of an assortment of standards.

Airline pilots are trained to perform only what are called "stabilized approaches." This means that when approaching a runway to land, it is mandatory that various performance factors be stabilized and not allowed to vary significantly when below 500 feet above the ground. Target airspeed on final approach must be established and stabilized; power required for the descent must be established and stabilized; the required rate of descent must be established and stabilized; and the airplane must be on the desired descent profile and stabilized.

If any of these variables becomes unstabilized or allowed to vary significantly, the pilot is required to abandon the approach and begin anew. But according to the NTSB, the Asiana pilots didn't try to abort the landing until seconds before the crash.

The $64,000 question then becomes, why did neither pilot take assertive, corrective action earlier? This has become the great mystery of Flight 214, but whatever the answers turns out to be, inexperience isn't likely to be high on the list.

Barry Schiff is an author, journalist, aviation expert and retired Trans World Airlines captain with 34 years of experience.

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